Publish gate

Agents that draft announcements, social posts, release notes or newsletters should never publish on their own. This gate lets the human edit the text and choose how to approve (now or scheduled), and makes silence safe: an unanswered post expires as denied. Script: examples/cookbook/publish-gate.sh.

sh examples/cookbook/publish-gate.sh examples/cookbook/post.md

The request

{
  "title": "Publish this post?",
  "summary": "Announcement draft, 160 characters",
  "kind": "review",
  "risk": "high",
  "tool": "social.publish",
  "source": {"agent": "launch-agent"},
  "dedupe_key": "publish:78f6b4b8601e0d3c",
  "timeout": "2h",
  "on_timeout": "deny",
  "previews": [{"type": "markdown", "inline": "handup 0.2 is out: …"}],
  "input": {"fields": [
    {"name": "text", "type": "textarea", "label": "Post text", "default": "handup 0.2 is out: …", "required": true}
  ]},
  "options": [
    {"id": "now", "label": "Publish now", "outcome": "approve", "style": "primary"},
    {"id": "schedule", "label": "Schedule for 9:00", "outcome": "approve"},
    {"id": "deny", "label": "Don't post", "outcome": "deny", "style": "danger"}
  ]
}

What each part does:

Part	Effect
Two approve options	The human picks the path; decision.option is now or schedule
textarea field with default	The draft is editable in place; the edit returns as fields.text
risk: high	High-risk alerting; YOLO never approves it either, because it has a form and two approve options
timeout + on_timeout: deny	After two hours the request expires with a denied decision (exit 2)
dedupe_key from a content hash	Rerunning the agent on the same text returns the same pending request

key=$(sha256sum "$post" | cut -c1-16)

Reading the decision

The selected option id says which approval path was chosen; the edited text replaces the draft:

printf '%s' "$decision" | jq --rawfile text "$post" '
  {when: (if .option == "schedule" then "scheduled" else "now" end),
   text: (.fields.text // $text)}'

{"when": "scheduled", "text": "handup 0.2 is out: …"}

Publish exactly that text once. Exit 2 (expired) and exit 1 (denied, with feedback on stderr) both mean do not post.

Variations

• Multiple channels: add a select or several boolean fields (post_x, post_linkedin, post_mastodon) and post only to the checked ones.
• Images: attach the rendered card or screenshot as an image preview (upload it with POST /v1/blobs or pass a local path through the CLI) so the human approves the visual, not just the words.
• Release notes: use a diff preview against the last published notes.
• Long timeouts: for a post due tomorrow, use timeout: "18h"; the request.expiring hook event fires notifications.on_expiring before the deadline so you can still answer.